A touch screen is a device that may detect a position when a user's hand or an object is touched to characters or specific positions displayed on a screen without using an input device such as a keyboard or a mouse and perform a specific function.
The touch screen is basically configured of a touch panel, a touch controller, a driver soft ware (SW), and the like. The touch panel serves to determine the presence or absence of touch input, to detect input coordinates, and to transfer a signal to the touch controller, the controller serves to convert the signal transferred from the touch panel to a digital signal and output coordinates on a display, and the driver SW is a program allowing the touch panel to receive the digital signal from the controller to thereby be implemented appropriately for each of the operation systems.
The touch screen is divided into a resistive type touch screen, a capacitive touch screen, a surface acoustic wave (SAW) type touch screen, an infrared (IR) type touch screen, or the like, according to the implementation type of the touch panel.
The resistive type touch screen has a structure in which two substrates including a transparent electrode coated thereon are attached to each other, and operates in a manner of recognizing a position through an electric signal generated when pressure is applied to the resistive type touch screen by a finger or a pen and thus upper and lower electrode layers are touched to each other. This resistive type touch screen is cheap, accurate, and advantageous in miniaturization. The capacitive touch screen operates in a manner of detecting static electricity generated from human body and has strong durability, a short reaction time, and excellent transmittance.
The SAW type touch screen operates in a manner of detecting a decrease in amplitude of an emitted surface acoustic wave when the surface acoustic wave reaches an obstacle and has excellent light transmittance, accuracy, and visibility. Further, in the IR type touch panel, a light emitting device and a light detecting device are disposed so as to face each other to recognize coordinates blocked by touch, and the IR type touch panel may be implemented only by a single sheet of glass without an indium tin oxide (ITO) film, or the like, such that transmittance may be at the highest level (Kwon Ji In et al., Information and Communications Policy, 20, 2008).
Particularly, the capacitive touch screen is an input device recently and widely used in various small-sized terminals such as a smart phone, a tablet PC, or the like (FIG. 1). More specifically, the principle of the capacitive touch screen is as follows. After applying a predetermined voltage from a touch controller to four corners of a touch panel to form a capacitive layer on a surface of the touch panel and touching this panel with a conductor (human body, mainly a finger), or the like, to change capacitance at a touch site, the touch controller detects this change and calculates a touch position to output the detected change amount and the calculated touch position on an external display device.
Meanwhile, currently, an in vitro diagnosis field for analyzing biomolecules associated with various diseases is a field for examining a health state and progression state of a disease in addition to early diagnosis of various diseases and is actively used in disease group selection and disease prevention, diagnosis and treatment monitoring, individual health state examination, and genetic examination, and veterinary medicine, environment management, food management, or the like, as a non-medical field. Recently, a highly infectious disease such as a disease caused by a mutant influenza virus, a foot-and-mouth disease, or the like, has been prevalent, which has generated a national crisis, and a demand for improving quality of life has increased, such that a demand for treatment monitoring or regular health checkup and importance thereof have been highlighted. Therefore, since a technology of analyzing the biomolecules associated with various diseases is economically and technologically significantly important and has a significant industrial ripple effect, the technology of analyzing the biomolecules has been actively studied globally.
Currently, in the in vitro diagnosis field, an assay method such as real-time polymerase chain reaction (real-time PCR) assay, enzyme-linked immonosorbent assay (ELISA), or the like, has been most prevalently used, but these assay methods require an analysis apparatus having a large volume or high cost or a skilled technique in the art or a long analysis time. Therefore, currently, most of the in vitro diagnosis may be performed only at a university/general hospital or a professional diagnostic center, which is equipped with professional equipments and professionals, and it takes a large amount of time and cost from sampling process to providing information of the result. In order to overcome this limitation, a point-of-care testing (POCT) system capable of being utilized in a local small hospital and a health center, or in home should be implemented. To this end, the development of a cheap and small sized analysis apparatus capable of simply performing in vitro molecular analysis has been demanded.
Therefore, the present inventors have tried to develop a method of detecting biomolecules capable of simply performing in vitro molecular analysis in a home instead of the existing in vitro diagnosis apparatus requiring a professional analysis apparatus and professional technique. As a result, the present inventors confirmed that in the case of touching biomolecules of which electric conductivity is changed according to the concentration to a capacitive touch screen to directly/indirectly measure capacitance of the touch panel changed according to the concentration, the corresponding biomolecules may be detected and quantified, thereby completing the present invention.